Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

172 P. Smeyers
to the simple fact that if we do nothing people will die. There is a real danger that
knowing too much may push other aspects out of the way. It is not only that reductionism
looms, but that it becomes quite difficult to get the balance right. Too much
particularity thus turns out to be potentially dangerous. It is to the issue of whether
statistics can do justice to reality, to one or other kind of complexity, to which I now
turn.
11.4 In the Structure of the Language: Living with Complexity
and Statistics
In the Philosophical Investigations Ludwig Wittgenstein argues against essences
and metaphysics, or more precisely against our metaphysical disposition. For
Wittgenstein, this is exemplified in the general propositional form of a sentence.
Against the Augustinian picture of language (all propositions are or contain a
description), he argues that ‘language plays us entirely new tricks’ (Wittgenstein,
1966, Aesthetics, I, # 3). And in section 115 of the Philosophical Investigations he
writes ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our
language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably’ (Wittgenstein, 1953, I).
The reason for this is that in a proposition, something of the subject of that sentence
is always said. His move is in the opposite direction, towards particularity, and thus
philosophy offers reminders for a particular purpose. In this sense (and only in this
sense, because Wittgenstein is wary of theory generally and of looking for hypotheses
or ‘what is hidden from us’), statistics may not be that different at all from our
‘normal’ way of speaking. The antidote against the latter may give us some clues
to how we might develop an antidote against the former. We might also ask what
the place of policy in such a framework could be. However, clearly retreating into
‘a new way of looking at things’ as one or other kind of aesthetic existence may
not be enough to convince the sceptic. Though much can be said for particularity at
some point we may want to transgress such a stance because resources are limited
and we are urged to make decisions on a larger scale. There is much more to be said
about this, but I should return now to the central focus of this chapter, namely, the
attraction of statistical explanation.
Interestingly, the aesthetic dimension we touched upon has also been addressed
more generally in regard to research methodologies in the social sciences. David
Fenner (2006) for instance argues that quantitative and qualitative methodologies
could be seen as exemplifying respectively a disinterested and an engaged approach.
He maintains that there exists a strong parallel between current research methodologies
in the social sciences and the two most central and popular approaches to
aesthetics over the last 4 centuries. Fenner approvingly quotes Eddy Zemach who
argues that within the stance of scientific realism, ‘Scientists apply criteria to theories,
such that those theories that best meet those criteria are those theories judged
to most closely approximate the truth’ and that ‘[a]t least in part, these criteria are